#brandinga22

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Reflection - Black and Decker

In order to improve their market share in the Professional-Tradesmen power tools sector, I believe that Black and Decker should drop their name from their product and use the DeWalt name instead. As someone who previously has worked in an industrial setting where these tools are used, I know that the brand of the tool is very important to the tradesman. They want a tool that is of high quality and has a brand that will not put their masculinity at risk. As stated in the case by two tradesmen, they were made fun of by their colleagues when using the Black and Decker tools as they were associated with household products instead of trades tools. I do not think this association is something Black and Decker can come back from.

DeWalt is stated to be a brand that has a 70% awareness rating with most people positively disposed to it. It also has a “Is One of the Best” agreement percent of 63% from tradesmen as compared to Black and Decker’s 44%. As Black and Decker owns this brand, I believe using it in this industry with this initial reputation gives them a head start in taking market share from Makita. I would not recommend using any Black and Decker branding on the tool even though the purchase interest is shown to increase slightly. I think this may hurt the brand overtime as more people realize that DeWalt is owned by Black and Decker and may result in some customers having negative associations with the brand. I would adopt the yellow color selection as it differentiates the DeWalt product further from Black and Decker and it is unique but also matches with the bright color scheme of competitors tools in this industry.

Lastly, I wanted to mention that during my time working in an industrial setting where these tools were used, there were two clear brands preferred and used by tradesmen: Milwaukee and DeWalt. I could easily pick out the type of tool each tradesman was using based on the bright red or yellow colors. In reading the first few pages of this case, I was confused as to why they were not mentioning DeWalt – I did not realize they were owned by Black and Decker until the end of the case. Therefore, assuming this strategy was adopted by Black and Decker, I believe it worked.  

[s-boulger]

The Black & Decker Corporation: Power Tools Division

When a powerful brand name and high quality are not enough

In the 1990s Black & Decker (B&D), a portable power tool company, had a well-known brand name and had established the highest quality in the industry. B&D’s business had three main segments: professional-industrial, professional-tradesmen, and consumer tools with segment shares of 20%, 9%, and 45%, respectively. What was causing the out of place 9%?: Tradesmen saw B&D tools as “not for them” and thought of them mainly as tools for “do-it-yourselfers” at home.

B&D’s VP of sales and marketing for power tools was faced with a difficult problem. One potential solution: drop the B&D name from the professional-tradesmen segment. Even if, in the long run, this strategy is successful, there might be short-term risks.

First, significant R&D goes into developing a new brand name. To spend extra time and money on a segment that is already a financial burden is certainly something to think twice about.

Second, the product might temporarily be overlooked on shelves, if the new name is not yet recognizable. In a market where performance and safety are so important, consumers will likely gravitate toward household names.

Picture Source: Out With the Facebookers. In With the Metamates. - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Third, there will always be those that criticize the alternative choice, both internally and externally. For example, when Facebook renamed itself “Meta” some employees were confused and uncertain about the shift (Source: Out With the Facebookers. In With the Metamates. - The New York Times (nytimes.com)).

A drastic change like dropping the B&D name from the professional-tradesmen segment might be necessary, but B&D should ensure they get it right.

Case source: Professor Robert J. Dolan, The Black & Decker Corporation (A): Power Tools Division, Harvard Business School Case.

[itsinthename]

Exploitative Marketing - The case of tanning products in Greece

Companies utilize numerous unethical marketing tricks that play with people’s insecurities and the desire of many marginalized groups to feel that they can also become part of the wider “in-group”. As our case showed this week, the Indian market of fair skin creams is one paradigmatic such case, primarily for women. Similar examples can be found all across the world, especially across Asia (e.g. Korean women and eyelid-altering surgeries, Japanese women and the quest for the perfect thin body and Chinese women and fair skin).

It is particularly interesting (and worrying) to note that when it comes down to skincare products, exploitative brands tend to predominantly target women, often of unrepresented backgrounds, lower incomes, and younger ages. This is an important commonality across geographies and ethnicities that points to the ubiquitous nature of such preying tactics, and the fact that this is a much more global problem than often understood.

Another interesting case that comes to mind is (self-)tanning creams and Greek women. Contrary to the desire to look fairer found in many parts of the Eastern world, many Greek women prefer to tone up their darker-skinned characteristics – not only during the summer, but all year long. Having a darker (and well-tanned) skin in Greece is considered particularly appealing, and in many ways sexier as well, making it a desired end-state for many women. 

To be fully honest, I am not exactly sure of the exact reasons behind the dark-skin preference in Greece, but I have four basic hunches: 

1) Tanned skin exudes a constant "summer state of mind" that most Greeks want to be in. 

2) Greece has traditionally been placed between two worlds, East and West, through its long history in the world. While siding firmly with the West, it always had deep roots in the East, and liked to "protest" many of the more Western-like features of its identity. 

3) There is a palpable admiration of strong and "seductive" Latin/Spanish/Italian women in Greece, which is why women with darker (and well-tanned) skin are also very appealing to Greek men.

4) It's an Eastern Mediterranean thing!

Most Greek women tend to do a lot of tanning once the summer begins to achieve the perfect bronze skin that will last them well into the Winter. Many even frequent tanning salons as the summer season begins in order to have a heads-up once the first few beach-bound photographs will start to be uploaded on Instagram. Over the years, Greek women have also turned towards tan-enabling products – from hydrating creams for their hands and organic body/face “glow” lotions to tanning sprays, bronzers, and tanning sunscreens – that are advertising a darker-skin style of beauty.

Unexpectedly, various brands have been toying with this particular cultural affinity of Greek women towards darker skin. Fairer skinned women are often seen as weaker on Greek TV advertisements, while well-tanned darker-skinned women are often portrayed as stronger, much more desirable and in control (of their sensuality), especially by young influencers on Instagram.

[pcamareromit]

Ethical obligations towards consumers

My take from the Fair & Lovely case and the Dark is Beauty campaign, is that we do not necessarily need to ban or suppress products that cover social needs such as skin whitening, in the same way, that we do not ban or suppress products that focus on skin tanning. What we need to address is the implications of marketing products with a negative connotation way such as race, caste, color, creed, or nationality discrimination. Whether consumers want to buy products that whiten or darken their skin or not is their choice. What we really need to address is the implications, perception, and influence of the way brands are marketing these products to society.

From the middle-school child considering the premier brands of soccer shoes to overpromising cosmetics depicting fairness as the key to success, a common marketing message from consumer brands is "you will perform better with us".

Recalling the Dove Beauty patches example seen in class, ads overpromise results that are never successfully achieved. Laboratory studies demonstrate that this performance brand effect emerges through psychological mechanisms unrelated to functional product differences, consistent with a placebo. This effect emerges only when there is an expectation that the performance branded product affects outcomes. Those consumers lower in preexisting domain self-efficacy beliefs exhibit more substantial performance gains, whereas, for those particularly high in domain self-efficacy, the placebo is mitigated.

Products bearing premium brand labels are known to increase perceptions of efficacy and improve objective consumer performance relative to lesser-branded equivalents, in what is traditionally described as a marketing placebo effect. This same marketing placebo effect is reflected when using celebrities to promote certain beauty and consumer products.

Again, what we really need to address is the implications, perception, and influence of the way brands are marketing products to society!

[pcamareromit]

Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation Theory

More a-peeling peanut butter? The days of scooping peanut butter straight out of the jar with a spoon may be nearing an end. Researchers at the Oklahoma State University’s Robert M. Kerr Food & Agricultural Products Center have developed peanut butter slices that are individually wrapped! Is this what the customer is looking for? Is this a real innovation? Hell no! More important than spending 1 min spreading butter is to have no regrets when eating peanut butter. After talking to foodservice providers, distributors, and a wide array of demographics testing, it became evident that consumers were no longer interested in the original product. Consumers were more excited about bite-size healthy snacks to incorporate into their busy lives!

How Collapsible is a Collapsible Wheel? Folding bicycles are great, as they can collapse the bike into an impressively compact frame. The problem is, that frame is still limited by the diameter of the wheel since the darn thing will have to retain its full diameter. Is this solving a real problem? The Revolve Folding Wheel can potentially change that. That’s right, it’s a folding bicycle wheel that can collapse into a compact bundle, effectively cutting down the diameter into nearly a third of its original form. It shrinks it enough that you can throw two of these wheels into most backpacks without any problem, all while leaving enough room to hold other gear. 

How a tiny manufacturer of wooden jigsaw puzzles created an addiction that high achievers can´t kick.

After countless months of research, a few boxes of bandaids, and many sleepless nights... Stave Puzzles was born! In 1974, Steve and Dave combined their names to form their new company – Stave (which means to break into pieces). But, even though Stave puzzle became mainstream in NY with a simple little ad in a newspaper, the scalability of the business was very limited. Dave loved the marketing side of the business, but he just couldn’t cut it (literally) at scale. He eventually sold his share of Stave Puzzles to Steve for $1 and a saw and went on to start a new company creating children’s puzzles. 

How Polytrack changed horse racing forever.

When Pino finally leaned forward, Hard Spun swooped around the field and cantered down the stretch to win by three lengths. He looked like nothing less than a Kentucky Derby winner. 

It’s strange to hear, that Hard Spun almost spurned Churchill Downs. The Derby, you see, is run on clay-rich Southern dirt. The Lane’s End? It was run on plastic. Yes, plastic. Turfway Park, the site of the Lane’s End Stakes, was the first racecourse in North America to install Polytrack, a synthetic racing surface composed of polypropylene fibers, rubber, and silica sand, all beneath a wax coating. Polytrack was designed to cut down on bone-snapping injuries. So far, it’s doing that: In 2005-06, Turfway’s first Polytrack season, there were three fatal breakdowns, compared with 24 the year before. But as Hard Spun shows, it has also created a parallel racing universe that will change the way races are run, alter the breeding industry, and make reams of old handicapping information useless. Is this an innovation? It is. Was the product diffusion easy? Not at all. Is this an innovation? It is. Was the product diffusion easy? Not at all. Changing the minds of racers, horse enthusiasts, breeders and so many other stakeholders in such a competitive sport was not easy at all.

[pcamareromit]

Is nudging sending our brains in the right direction?

Pointing at a fly in the urinal? That's the most famous example of a nudge, a friendly push in the right direction. There are many ways to positively manipulate people to make better decisions, but nudging must remain ethical.

If apples, bananas and muesli bars are close to the checkout in station shops, people seem to buy those healthy snacks more often. That fruit and bar move is a nudge, a friendly push in the right direction while retaining freedom of choice. But three quarters of the people do not realize that they are being nudged. Is that ethical? Does such behavioral influencing not affect their autonomy?

People normally have limited attention, limited time, limited cognitive capacity, and therefore, nudging should not manipulate or cheat. People have to be aware of what is happening! A nudge should be transparent, should only have clear benefits for people, should have a legitimate purpose, not affecting people's rights or interests and not taking anything from them without permission. 

Nudging should not forbid people to do anything and should not aim to change people’s minds by offering a substantial financial reward. It should merely be a subtle push in the right direction.

[itsinthename]

Market Research on steroids!

So… THIS is how they used to do market research back in the day!?

As someone with strong market research experience under his belt (market research for hedge fund, market intel for asset manager, PMR for various startups), I found the article very interesting. Not so much as it related to actionable insights, but insofar as it provided a very fascinating trip down memory lane to see how things used to happen three decades ago and how the domain has evolved ever since. 

Moreover, it served as a very lucid and simple explanation of how market research connects with strategic management decisions. This is a relation often missed in today’s professional world, as marketing is often (wrongly!) treated as a siloed extension of strategy, rather than as a complementary force to it. In my experience, companies are often very focused on ensuring that the link between market data and marketing decisions is robust, while glossing over the equally important link of both to the overall strategic management of the firm.

Many of the foundational elements remain very much relevant to this very day. The major dichotomies (primary vs. secondary data, experimental vs. non-experimental design, qualitative vs. quantitative research) and the research procedure, as described in the case, are still fundamental driving forces of conducting proper market research. 

In view of our upcoming branding lab, I think that the structured approach offered in the case can be very useful to iteratively build our in-depth investigation with my team. However, I also want us to make sure that we follow the steps outlined in a flexible way and with an experimental attitude, so as to integrate many of the new learnings and insights that have been produced over the past 30 years, especially as it pertains to the digital world (and its consumers, many of which are now highly sophisticated digital natives).

[munnen22]

Life Cereal and Market Research

Using Quaker Oat’s Life Cereal brand as an example case, it is clear how the various forms of market research are important both independently and in conjunction.  Life was created out of an opportunity identified from motivation research and was introduced with test market experiments to assess how consumers and the trade would respond if Life was placed in the market with various different forms.  The shredded biscuit form yielded the “highest repeat purchase rate and overall share.” Following product launch in the shredded biscuit form,  Life’s various advertising agencies focused largely on non-experimental/qualitative research including surveys and focus groups. 

While Life attempted various family-oriented advertisement campaigns such as the growing theme, it was revealed through a company attitudinal study that Ready-to-Eat (RTE) cereals were seen as “more tasty but less nutritious than hot cereals” (2).  Secondary data, while not prioritized by Life’s advertising teams, also turned out to be a particularly useful resource as it revealed only 13% of buyers say the reason they buy a particular cereal is nutrition.  Industry sources also revealed that Special K had a significantly higher advertising budget than Life was proposing in the case.  Given these insights, increasing attention and budget to advertising as well as focusing on the tastiness of the cereal would appear to be an important direction for the company.  Aired in 1972, an iconic commercial that became known as “Mikey Likes It!” was launched.  It was instantly popular and aired for nearly a decade, and a remake was even done in the early 2000′s.  The commercial focused on the good taste of the cereal that even the pickiest of kids would like and was presented in a very relatable scene.  Market research had indicated shifting away from a nutrition focus and towards a taste focus could be fruitful, and indeed this prediction was realized in the case of Life cereal.  

Here is a great summary video showing the history of Life and clips of the commercials mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-8IKP86EAI

https://www.mashed.com/218962/the-untold-truth-of-life-cereal/